OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
VGF: Value-Guided Fuzzing -- Fuzzing Hardware as Hardware
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2023
Year: 2023

As the complexity of logic designs increase, new avenues for testing digital hardware becomes necessary. Fuzz Testing (fuzzing) has recently received attention as a potential candidate for input vector generation on hardware designs. Using this technique, a fuzzer is used to generate an input to a logic design. Using a simulation engine, the logic design is given the generated stimulus and some metric of feedback is given to the fuzzer to aid in the input mutation. However, much like software fuzzing, hardware fuzzing uses code coverage as a metric to find new possible fuzzing paths. Unfortunately, as we show in this work, this coverage metric falls short of generic on some hardware designs where designers have taken a more direct approach at expressing a particular microarchitecture, or implementation, of the desired hardware. With this work, we introduce a new coverage metric which employs not code coverage, but state coverage internal to a design. By observing changes in signals within the logic circuit under testing, we are able to explore the state space of the design and provide feedback to a fuzzer engine for input generation. Our approach, Value-Guided Fuzzing (VGF), provides a generic metric of coverage which can be applied to any design regardless of its implementation. In this paper, we introduce our state-based VGF metric as well as a sample implementation which can be used with any VPI, DPI, VHPI, or FLI compliant simulator, making it completely HDL agnostic. We demonstrate the generality of VGF and show how our sample implementation is capable of finding bugs considerably faster than previous approaches.
Examining the Effect of Implementation Factors on Deep Learning Reproducibility
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

Reproducing published deep learning papers to validate their conclusions can be difficult due to sources of irreproducibility. We investigate the impact that implementation factors have on the results and how they affect reproducibility of deep learning studies. Three deep learning experiments were ran five times each on 13 different hardware environments and four different software environments. The analysis of the 780 combined results showed that there was a greater than 6% accuracy range on the same deterministic examples introduced from hardware or software environment variations alone. To account for these implementation factors, researchers should run their experiments multiple times in different hardware and software environments to verify their conclusions are not affected.
Online Decision Making with History-Average Dependent Costs (Extended)
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

In many online sequential decision-making scenarios, a learner's choices affect not just their current costs but also the future ones. In this work, we look at one particular case of such a situation where the costs depend on the time average of past decisions over a history horizon. We first recast this problem with history dependent costs as a problem of decision making under stage-wise constraints. To tackle this, we then propose the novel Follow-The-Adaptively-Regularized-Leader (FTARL) algorithm. Our innovative algorithm incorporates adaptive regularizers that depend explicitly on past decisions, allowing us to enforce stage-wise constraints while simultaneously enabling us to establish tight regret bounds. We also discuss the implications of the length of history horizon on design of no-regret algorithms for our problem and present impossibility results when it is the full learning horizon.
Audio-Visual LLM for Video Understanding
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

This paper presents Audio-Visual LLM, a Multimodal Large Language Model that takes both visual and auditory inputs for holistic video understanding. A key design is the modality-augmented training, which involves the integration of modality-specific tokens engineered to activate the appropriate visual and/or auditory encoder selectively. This mechanism is pivotal in enabling end-to-end joint training with video data at different modalities, including visual-only, audio-only, and audio-visual formats. Moreover, we introduce a high-quality video instruction dataset, derived from GPT-4. This dataset allows Audio-Visual LLM to adeptly process a variety of task-oriented video instructions, ranging from multi-turn conversations and audio-visual narratives to complex reasoning tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Audio-Visual LLM impressively achieves strong zero-shot results across a range of video understanding tasks. For example, Audio-Visual LLM achieves an accuracy of 53.7% on MSRVTT-QA, outperforming non-LLM-based InterVideo by 6.6% and LLM-based Valley by 4.4%, respectively. Additionally, our Audio-Visual LLM also achieves competitive performance on audio tasks (e.g., AudioCaps).
Efficient and Effective Similarity Search over Bipartite Graphs
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2023
Year: 2023

Similarity search over a bipartite graph aims to retrieve from the graph the nodes that are similar to each other, which finds applications in various fields such as online advertising, recommender systems etc. Existing similarity measures either (i) overlook the unique properties of bipartite graphs, or (ii) fail to capture high-order information between nodes accurately, leading to suboptimal result quality. Recently, Hidden Personalized PageRank (HPP) is applied to this problem and found to be more effective compared with prior similarity measures. However, existing solutions for HPP computation incur significant computational costs, rendering it inefficient especially on large graphs. In this paper, we first identify an inherent drawback of HPP and overcome it by proposing bidirectional HPP (BHPP). Then, we formulate similarity search over bipartite graphs as the problem of approximate BHPP computation, and present an efficient solution Approx-BHPP. Specifically, Approx-BHPP offers rigorous theoretical accuracy guarantees with optimal computational complexity by combining deterministic graph traversal with matrix operations in an optimized and non-trivial way. Moreover, our solution achieves significant gain in practical efficiency due to several carefully-designed optimizations. Extensive experiments, comparing BHPP against 8 existing similarity measures over 7 real bipartite graphs, demonstrate the effectiveness of BHPP on query rewriting and item recommendation. Moreover, Approx-BHPP outperforms baseline solutions often by up to orders of magnitude in terms of computational time on both small and large datasets.
A Multimodal Dataset and Benchmark for Radio Galaxy and Infrared Host Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

We present a novel multimodal dataset developed by expert astronomers to automate the detection and localisation of multi-component extended radio galaxies and their corresponding infrared hosts. The dataset comprises 4,155 instances of galaxies in 2,800 images with both radio and infrared modalities. Each instance contains information on the extended radio galaxy class, its corresponding bounding box that encompasses all of its components, pixel-level segmentation mask, and the position of its corresponding infrared host galaxy. Our dataset is the first publicly accessible dataset that includes images from a highly sensitive radio telescope, infrared satellite, and instance-level annotations for their identification. We benchmark several object detection algorithms on the dataset and propose a novel multimodal approach to identify radio galaxies and the positions of infrared hosts simultaneously.
BPF-oF: Storage Function Pushdown Over the Network
Venue: arXiv cs.OS 2023
Year: 2023

Storage disaggregation, wherein storage is accessed over the network, is popular because it allows applications to independently scale storage capacity and bandwidth based on dynamic application demand. However, the added network processing introduced by disaggregation can consume significant CPU resources. In many storage systems, logical storage operations (e.g., lookups, aggregations) involve a series of simple but dependent I/O access patterns. Therefore, one way to reduce the network processing overhead is to execute dependent series of I/O accesses at the remote storage server, reducing the back-and-forth communication between the storage layer and the application. We refer to this approach as \emph{remote-storage pushdown}. We present BPF-oF, a new remote-storage pushdown protocol built on top of NVMe-oF, which enables applications to safely push custom eBPF storage functions to a remote storage server. The main challenge in integrating BPF-oF with storage systems is preserving the benefits of their client-based in-memory caches. We address this challenge by designing novel caching techniques for storage pushdown, including splitting queries into separate in-memory and remote-storage phases and periodically refreshing the client cache with sampled accesses from the remote storage device. We demonstrate the utility of BPF-oF by integrating it with three storage systems, including RocksDB, a popular persistent key-value store that has no existing storage pushdown capability. We show BPF-oF provides significant speedups in all three systems when accessed over the network, for example improving RocksDB's throughput by up to 2.8$\times$ and tail latency by up to 2.6$\times$.
Hybrid-Rendering Techniques in GPU
Venue: arXiv cs.GR 2023
Year: 2023

Ray tracing has long been the holy grail of real time rendering. This technique, commonly used for photo realism, simulates the physical behavior of light, at the cost of being computationally heavy. With the introduction of Nvidia RTX graphic card family, which provides hardware support for ray tracing, this technique started to look like a reality for real time. However, the same problems that afflicted the usage of this technique remain, and even with specialized hardware it is still extremely expensive. To account for these drawbacks, researchers and developers pair this technique with rasterization and denoising. This results in a hybrid system that tries to join the best of both worlds, having both photo realistic quality and real time performance. In this work we intend on further exploring hybrid render systems, offering a review of the state of the art with a special focus on real time ray tracing and our own hybrid implementation with photo realistic quality and real time performance (>30 fps), implemented using the Vulkan API. In this project, we highlight the detailed analysis of the impacts of History Rectification (Variance Color Clamping) on the temporal filter component of the denoising system and how to overcome the introduced artifacts. Additionally, we also highlight the analysis of the introduction of a separable blur on the spatial filter and the introduction of Reinhard Tone Mapping prior to denoising, consequently improving this procedure.
NDELS: A Novel Approach for Nighttime Dehazing, Low-Light Enhancement, and Light Suppression
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

This paper tackles the intricate challenge of improving the quality of nighttime images under hazy and low-light conditions. Overcoming issues including nonuniform illumination glows, texture blurring, glow effects, color distortion, noise disturbance, and overall, low light have proven daunting. Despite the inherent difficulties, this paper introduces a pioneering solution named Nighttime Dehazing, Low-Light Enhancement, and Light Suppression (NDELS). NDELS utilizes a unique network that combines three essential processes to enhance visibility, brighten low-light regions, and effectively suppress glare from bright light sources. In contrast to limited progress in nighttime dehazing, unlike its daytime counterpart, NDELS presents a comprehensive and innovative approach. The efficacy of NDELS is rigorously validated through extensive comparisons with eight state-of-the-art algorithms across four diverse datasets. Experimental results showcase the superior performance of our method, demonstrating its outperformance in terms of overall image quality, including color and edge enhancement. Quantitative (PSNR, SSIM) and qualitative metrics (CLIPIQA, MANIQA, TRES), measure these results.
Scalable Decentralized Cooperative Platoon using Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

Cooperative autonomous driving plays a pivotal role in improving road capacity and safety within intelligent transportation systems, particularly through the deployment of autonomous vehicles on urban streets. By enabling vehicle-to-vehicle communication, these systems expand the vehicles environmental awareness, allowing them to detect hidden obstacles and thereby enhancing safety and reducing crash rates compared to human drivers who rely solely on visual perception. A key application of this technology is vehicle platooning, where connected vehicles drive in a coordinated formation. This paper introduces a vehicle platooning approach designed to enhance traffic flow and safety. Developed using deep reinforcement learning in the Unity 3D game engine, known for its advanced physics, this approach aims for a high-fidelity physical simulation that closely mirrors real-world conditions. The proposed platooning model focuses on scalability, decentralization, and fostering positive cooperation through the introduced predecessor-follower "sharing and caring" communication framework. The study demonstrates how these elements collectively enhance autonomous driving performance and robustness, both for individual vehicles and for the platoon as a whole, in an urban setting. This results in improved road safety and reduced traffic congestion.
Interactive Planning Using Large Language Models for Partially Observable Robotics Tasks
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

Designing robotic agents to perform open vocabulary tasks has been the long-standing goal in robotics and AI. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved impressive results in creating robotic agents for performing open vocabulary tasks. However, planning for these tasks in the presence of uncertainties is challenging as it requires \enquote{chain-of-thought} reasoning, aggregating information from the environment, updating state estimates, and generating actions based on the updated state estimates. In this paper, we present an interactive planning technique for partially observable tasks using LLMs. In the proposed method, an LLM is used to collect missing information from the environment using a robot and infer the state of the underlying problem from collected observations while guiding the robot to perform the required actions. We also use a fine-tuned Llama 2 model via self-instruct and compare its performance against a pre-trained LLM like GPT-4. Results are demonstrated on several tasks in simulation as well as real-world environments. A video describing our work along with some results could be found here.
Understanding and Leveraging the Learning Phases of Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

The learning dynamics of deep neural networks are not well understood. The information bottleneck (IB) theory proclaimed separate fitting and compression phases. But they have since been heavily debated. We comprehensively analyze the learning dynamics by investigating a layer's reconstruction ability of the input and prediction performance based on the evolution of parameters during training. We empirically show the existence of three phases using common datasets and architectures such as ResNet and VGG: (i) near constant reconstruction loss, (ii) decrease, and (iii) increase. We also derive an empirically grounded data model and prove the existence of phases for single-layer networks. Technically, our approach leverages classical complexity analysis. It differs from IB by relying on measuring reconstruction loss rather than information theoretic measures to relate information of intermediate layers and inputs. Our work implies a new best practice for transfer learning: We show empirically that the pre-training of a classifier should stop well before its performance is optimal.
Content-Localization based Neural Machine Translation for Informal Dialectal Arabic: Spanish/French to Levantine/Gulf Arabic
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Resources in high-resource languages have not been efficiently exploited in low-resource languages to solve language-dependent research problems. Spanish and French are considered high resource languages in which an adequate level of data resources for informal online social behavior modeling, is observed. However, a machine translation system to access those data resources and transfer their context and tone to a low-resource language like dialectal Arabic, does not exist. In response, we propose a framework that localizes contents of high-resource languages to a low-resource language/dialects by utilizing AI power. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first work to provide a parallel translation dataset from/to informal Spanish and French to/from informal Arabic dialects. Using this, we aim to enrich the under-resource-status dialectal Arabic and fast-track the research of diverse online social behaviors within and across smart cities in different geo-regions. The experimental results have illustrated the capability of our proposed solution in exploiting the resources between high and low resource languages and dialects. Not only this, but it has also been proven that ignoring dialects within the same language could lead to misleading analysis of online social behavior.
SM70: A Large Language Model for Medical Devices
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

We are introducing SM70, a 70 billion-parameter Large Language Model that is specifically designed for SpassMed's medical devices under the brand name 'JEE1' (pronounced as G1 and means 'Life'). This large language model provides more accurate and safe responses to medical-domain questions. To fine-tune SM70, we used around 800K data entries from the publicly available dataset MedAlpaca. The Llama2 70B open-sourced model served as the foundation for SM70, and we employed the QLoRA technique for fine-tuning. The evaluation is conducted across three benchmark datasets - MEDQA - USMLE, PUBMEDQA, and USMLE - each representing a unique aspect of medical knowledge and reasoning. The performance of SM70 is contrasted with other notable LLMs, including Llama2 70B, Clinical Camel 70 (CC70), GPT 3.5, GPT 4, and Med-Palm, to provide a comparative understanding of its capabilities within the medical domain. Our results indicate that SM70 outperforms several established models in these datasets, showcasing its proficiency in handling a range of medical queries, from fact-based questions derived from PubMed abstracts to complex clinical decision-making scenarios. The robust performance of SM70, particularly in the USMLE and PUBMEDQA datasets, suggests its potential as an effective tool in clinical decision support and medical information retrieval. Despite its promising results, the paper also acknowledges the areas where SM70 lags behind the most advanced model, GPT 4, thereby highlighting the need for further development, especially in tasks demanding extensive medical knowledge and intricate reasoning.
Dynamic Corrective Self-Distillation for Better Fine-Tuning of Pretrained Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

We tackle the challenging issue of aggressive fine-tuning encountered during the process of transfer learning of pre-trained language models (PLMs) with limited labeled downstream data. This problem primarily results in a decline in performance on the subsequent task. Inspired by the adaptive boosting method in traditional machine learning, we present an effective dynamic corrective self-distillation (DCS) approach to improve the fine-tuning of the PLMs. Our technique involves performing a self-distillation mechanism where, at each iteration, the student model actively adapts and corrects itself by dynamically adjusting the weights assigned to individual data points. This iterative self-correcting process significantly enhances the overall fine-tuning capability of PLMs, leading to improved performance and robustness. We conducted comprehensive evaluations using the GLUE benchmark demonstrating the efficacy of our method in enhancing the fine-tuning process for various PLMs across diverse downstream tasks.
Improving Factual Error Correction by Learning to Inject Factual Errors
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Factual error correction (FEC) aims to revise factual errors in false claims with minimal editing, making them faithful to the provided evidence. This task is crucial for alleviating the hallucination problem encountered by large language models. Given the lack of paired data (i.e., false claims and their corresponding correct claims), existing methods typically adopt the mask-then-correct paradigm. This paradigm relies solely on unpaired false claims and correct claims, thus being referred to as distantly supervised methods. These methods require a masker to explicitly identify factual errors within false claims before revising with a corrector. However, the absence of paired data to train the masker makes accurately pinpointing factual errors within claims challenging. To mitigate this, we propose to improve FEC by Learning to Inject Factual Errors (LIFE), a three-step distantly supervised method: mask-corrupt-correct. Specifically, we first train a corruptor using the mask-then-corrupt procedure, allowing it to deliberately introduce factual errors into correct text. The corruptor is then applied to correct claims, generating a substantial amount of paired data. After that, we filter out low-quality data, and use the remaining data to train a corrector. Notably, our corrector does not require a masker, thus circumventing the bottleneck associated with explicit factual error identification. Our experiments on a public dataset verify the effectiveness of LIFE in two key aspects: Firstly, it outperforms the previous best-performing distantly supervised method by a notable margin of 10.59 points in SARI Final (19.3% improvement). Secondly, even compared to ChatGPT prompted with in-context examples, LIFE achieves a superiority of 7.16 points in SARI Final.
The Logic of Doxastic Strategies
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

In many real-world situations, there is often not enough information to know that a certain strategy will succeed in achieving the goal, but there is a good reason to believe that it will. The paper introduces the term ``doxastic'' for such strategies. The main technical contribution is a sound and complete logical system that describes the interplay between doxastic strategy and belief modalities.
Neural Reasoning About Agents' Goals, Preferences, and Actions
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

We propose the Intuitive Reasoning Network (IRENE) - a novel neural model for intuitive psychological reasoning about agents' goals, preferences, and actions that can generalise previous experiences to new situations. IRENE combines a graph neural network for learning agent and world state representations with a transformer to encode the task context. When evaluated on the challenging Baby Intuitions Benchmark, IRENE achieves new state-of-the-art performance on three out of its five tasks - with up to 48.9% improvement. In contrast to existing methods, IRENE is able to bind preferences to specific agents, to better distinguish between rational and irrational agents, and to better understand the role of blocking obstacles. We also investigate, for the first time, the influence of the training tasks on test performance. Our analyses demonstrate the effectiveness of IRENE in combining prior knowledge gained during training for unseen evaluation tasks.